For two decades, Jon Watts covered climate change for The Guardian while quietly nursing a private hope: that some brilliant invention, arriving just in time, would make the whole crisis manageable. It is a comforting thought, and he is not alone in having had it. During a live reader Q&A this week on El Niño and the warming oceans, one reader asked plainly whether it was naive to wish for a "climate panacea" — some breakthrough that would let every nation, and every person, simply go carbon negative without much sacrifice. Watts's answer was blunt.

He said the hope itself has been part of the problem since at least the 1980s, when governments in Washington, London and beyond began deferring hard choices on emissions, betting that markets and future technology would quietly solve things later. That bet has been renewed, in different forms, in nearly every decade since, even as the underlying physics of the atmosphere kept changing. Now, with El Niño pushing ocean temperatures and weather extremes higher across Asia, the Americas and Europe, the costs of that deferral are becoming harder to defer any further. The conversation, which drew questions from readers worldwide, also tackled whether El Niño will raise food prices, whether the Atlantic's ocean circulation could collapse, and whether forecasting has kept pace with an accelerating climate.

Gabrielle Canon, the Guardian's extreme weather reporter, noted that El Niño events are being amplified by background warming in ways scientists are still working to quantify precisely. What emerged was not a single alarming statistic but a pattern: four decades of postponed decisions, each one justified by the promise of a future fix that never fully arrived. Readers pressed for certainty; the journalists offered none.